In a recent blog post, I wrote about picking up my high school memoir and struggling with the narrator challenge. To my surprise, the book has presented another writing challenge which is bringing me to a standstill.

While developing content for The Memoir Network’s Pick Up Your memoir Again—and Finish it! course, I wrote about how not writing the right memoir can constrict your writing. The person who has put down one memoir a number of weeks, or months, or even years ago, may not be able to pick it up again because the energy that had initially informed it is gone. The memoir has become the wrong memoir to be working on at this time. The energy necessary to complete it and the energy in your life may no longer be the same energy. Well, guess what…

Am I writing the right memoir?

I have felt constricted in my work with the high-school memoir I had written about elsewhere on this blog and it hit me as I was working on the Pick Up Your Memoir Again—and Finish It! course that perhaps the story was not the best memoir for me to be devoting myself to at this time. (Just as I had written about in the course—so you know the course is full of good stuff that going to hit you in the gut!).

You see, I have several memoirs in various stages of completion and this one happens to be the one that is perhaps the closest to sending out into the world. In short, it is apparently the one that needs the least work.  So…is this writing the right memoir? Well, this is not a bad reason to pick up a text—especially when you have several in your computer files waiting to be completed—but is ease of completion compelling enough to see a writer (me!) through the challenge of completing the manuscript?

I want it to be but I am not sure. So for the moment, I am continuing to write on the high-school book but I have my eye on another story which also has many pages of text. Am I looking for an excuse to procrastinate or do I have something here?

Are you writing the right memoir?

What has your experience been with picking a story up after a long time of letting it lie to the side? Let’s hear below what you have to say.